Since I’ve been posting material up on Niagara, a few other httpd and solaris folk have been chiming in with some more expert opinions. I’ve also received more dder output from various platforms, which I plan to post up when I get a chance.

What I couldn’t wait for though, is to communicate the effect some single changes in our benchmarking setup have achieved. A few days ago I raved about the 5700 requests per second I was getting out of the Niagara box. Turns out that was a load of crap, here’s what I’m getting now;

Requests per second: 15298.68 [#/sec] (mean)

And here’s what an active ftp.heanet.ie is pushing;

Requests per second: 4445.26 [#/sec] (mean)

Abandoning siege, and using the latest version of ab is revealing some fundamental limitations in our previous benchmarks and some errors in our assumptions. O.k., so my assumptions. My bad, and I wanted to try and rectify it as quickly as possible. As I scramble together some time over the next few days, we’ll recheck our other results, and see what else is lurking under the hood in terms of performance. We suspect there’s more room for growth.

Thanks to Brian Akins for nailing the problem. Oh, and we’re hearing a lot of very very good things about, and seeing some very nice numbers from, Opteron systems too.